


Whole

by unknowableroom_archivist



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen, One Shot
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-08-01
Updated: 2010-12-28
Packaged: 2019-01-19 21:30:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 3
Words: 4,530
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12418548
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/unknowableroom_archivist/pseuds/unknowableroom_archivist
Summary: A series of most unconnected oneshots about the people who make us, without whom we would not be, whole, what we do to get and keep them, and what happens when they leave.





	1. Flying and Dying Without George

**Author's Note:**

> Note from ChristyCorr, the archivist: this story was originally archived at [Unknowable Room](http://fanlore.org/wiki/Unknowable_Room), a Harry Potter archive active from 2005-2016. To preserve the archive, I began manually importing its works to the AO3 as an Open Doors-approved project after May 2017. I e-mailed all creators about the move and posted announcements, but may not have reached everyone. If you are (or know) this creator, please contact me using the e-mail address on [Unknowable Room collection profile](http://www.archiveofourown.org/collections/unknowableroom).

**Flying and Dying Without George**

 

            It may sound stupid, but the night that the Order rescued Harry Potter from Privet Drive was the first time that Fred realized that not only might he and George die in this War but that they would not necessarily die from the same curse as they fought side by side in battle.  That was the way in which he had always envisioned their possible death in the war.  Their death, always their death.

            But Severus Snape had fired at George Weasley, not the Weasley twins.  It was the first time that anyone had ever really made the distinction.

            Hadn’t Umbridge known that you had to ban both the Weasley twins even if only George had technically punched the hell out of that Malfoy brat?  She had known that it didn’t matter which had managed to actually land the blows, that it was the Weasley twins and Harry who attacked him.  Even McGonagall had never insisted on putting them in separate detentions the way Remus said she had with the great James Potter and Sirius Black.  All the teachers had punished them jointly, treated them that way, said nothing when their essays were identical.  McGonagall had not even suggested that they take the classes for which only one of them had received the required marks at N.E.W.T. level.  Even their parents didn’t bother anymore.

            Snape, on the other hand, was always putting them in separate detentions or assigning only one of them – they flipped a coin to decide who would go.  He tried assigning them extra work, different assignments – which they always completed together.  He sat them on opposite sides of the dungeon – like that mattered, but by that point he was probably getting desperate.  George was probably the only student – much less Gryffindor – much less troublemaker -- that Snape had ever pursued and tried to convince to take N.E.W.T.-level Potions.  He was the only teacher besides McGonagall who knew that the Weasley twins hadn’t received a measly three O.W.L.s apiece – those were just their overlapping qualifications.  They had different strengths, after all, they just always pooled their collective skills.  Snape had not taken it in stride the way the others always did.

            So how ironic that it was Snape, finally Snape, who got through in his attempts to treat them as individuals.  Sometimes they had wondered if he had time to teach them Potions with all the effort he expended into making them separable.  That more than anything made the twins regard him as a “slimy git,” full of contempt and annoyance.  He didn’t understand – he couldn’t understand them.  Well, the horrible slimy git had finally gotten through – to one of them.

            He had fired at George Weasley, not the Weasley twins.  That simple _sectumsempra_ had done what all his efforts over the years had not.  He had individualized the Weasley twins.  Ironic that he could only do it when he didn’t know that it was them – when the special doppelganger power of the Weasley twins was defused over the seven Harry Potters and not able to spare time to preserve their unity.

            It might not have meant as much if George had also woken up to the unthinkable reality that night.  Fred had known from the moment that George made that wretched joke that he hadn’t had the same world-shattering realization that night.  As far as he was concerned, the Weasley twins had been attacked and now carried the scars – all the more damaging in that everyone could now tell them apart.  He didn’t see the problem with that.  Fred and George Weasley were still just that – Fred and George Weasley, even if they couldn’t switch on their mother constantly until it was unclear even to themselves who was pretending to be whom and who really was who.

            George still knew him utterly – and perhaps he had enjoyed a small taste of the shock Fred had endured, or it spilled over into his consciousness from Fred’s – because he told him later that night, “Don’t be an arse and cut an ear off.”  Fred had been considering it – to relieve the gaping hole in his confidence which Snape’s spell had punctured.  Fred knew that George’s comment was not proof that his brother had had the same experience, however.  As far as George was concerned, they had already lost one ear, and they were going to need their remaining three.

            George had shrugged the experience off, mourning only the loss of a favorite gag on their mother.  Fred had lost considerably more than that.  The moment when he had had to ask if his twin had gone loopy – a situation they had always known might be the end result for the pair of them – had nearly broken him.  He had had to ask.  He hadn’t known.

            So Fred was ready to make the decision before him, and he was forced to make the decision that before he would have taken for granted.  He had to go through the long process of solitary rumination – a first for him, and shockingly frustrating without the constant exhilaration that came from exchange with George, what he would undoubtedly miss most – in a golden mist that gradually solidified into the Diagon Alley branch of Weasleys’ Wizarding Wheezes.  He walked along the empty shelves, idly thinking what belonged on each one.  He shrugged on the dragon-scale jacket last of all the clothes that appeared promptly in front of him, leaving the ones that had appeared for George hanging there in space.

            He could become a ghost.  He considered it seriously.  Float back to Hogwarts and take up residence as the pearly white double of George Weasley for the rest of their lives until he joined him and they terrorized Hogwarts as thoroughly as Peeves did until centuries later some Headmaster had the guts to ask them to leave and found a Ministry injunction that would actually keep them out.

            But then came the thought that George would soon stop looking exactly like him – in color – after only a few years.  Then their ghostly forms would have be explained – they would have to be the same while being so different.  And George would move on, and Fred would have to watch.  That would break their bond in a way that death could not.  And what if George, after a lifetime, just moved on?  Expecting his dead twin to be able to follow him?  Or what if Fred kept him so tied to death he wasn’t surprised by it and didn’t have the chance to think about the decision?

            Fred could wait here for him.  Surely George would arrive in the same place – call him there if nothing else.  Surely that would happen no matter what Fred did next.  Then they could go on together.

            But George would go on a journey in the rest of his life.  Fred couldn’t go along, and just waiting here until it finished…he wouldn’t recognize George when he finally arrived here.  He would be different, strange.  It would be fifty to a hundred years worth of what had happened in those months when Fred leapt forward to an understanding and George stayed still in the faulty belief that, of course, they would go together.

            It should have been him.  He was ready to comprehend the possibility.  George wasn’t.  George…the way this would hit George…

            George wouldn’t have thought it would make a difference.

            What would George do if it had been him?  It was a wrench – a mental wrench that he felt he should have stretched for first – to try to think what George would do.  He was spoiled on a lifetime of knowing what they would do.

            It was strange to think that you could feel pain here.  Everything he needed instantly appeared, his scars had all healed away, the evidence of the failed experiments, testimony of the lasting effects of those muted bangs the rest of the family took no notice of when it came from their room.  Why should he still hurt?

            Because George was hurting….

            The answer came to him in a flash.  He was still connected to George in that automatic way he had taken for granted for almost the whole of his life, right up until that fateful attack, then examined over and over again in the months until his death.  His death, not their death, but that didn’t seem to have changed as much as he had thought.  He hoped George could feel his peace if he could feel his pain – the peace he couldn’t help feeling in a place like this.

            George smiled.  So that was what people meant when they blathered on about loved ones never truly leaving us, was it?  He and George were so aware of their unity, their connection, that they could feel it immediately and powerfully.  He knew his twin’s pain and could only hope that the wonders of what lay _on_ would carry over to George as clearly as George’s life would echo in Fred.  In a way, it wasn’t so very different than embarking on a mission that required them to do something different at the same time.

            So that was what he would do.  He certainly needed to hold up his end of the bargain in bringing something to this joint plot.  Now that he knew that he was wrong – that no amount of separate injuries or delayed deaths could break up the Weasley twins, it was easy to find the wand to summon his broom appear in his hand.

            “ _Accio brooms!_ ” Gred gave a great cry.  Two Cleansweep Sevens shot toward him out of nowhere in the gold mist, sending parchment and products that had only just appeared flying as they went.  The one with the chain and peg still dangling off the end found his hand effortlessly.  Fred smirked wickedly, appreciating the fact that, like with that other great summoning charm that led him out of one world and into another, the broom had known that it didn’t matter that it was George’s broom.  It came to his hand just as willingly.  Even their brooms had never been able to tell the difference.

            So, for what was surprisingly only the second time in his life, Fred threw his leg over George’s broom, sent a shower of sparks to set off their Fireworks Section, and flew off into a brilliant sunset, keeping a close grip on George’s pain so that he would remain equally tied to Fred’s inescapable elation.


	2. The Will of Alphard Black

**The Will of Alphard Black**

            Alphard Black had been a younger brother groomed to take a step back from the Head of Family responsibilities in the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black.  He toed the line, he did not set it or even maintain it.  He had not been brought up to it.  He was a respectable member of the Black Family, and that sole fact made up the bulk of his identity.

            Alphard Black had never wanted the responsibility of his older brother and certainly not the duty required of his brother-in-law.  He had not been surprised at his sister Walburga’s marriage, though it had turned many heads in the wizarding world and even a few within the family.  Walburga was born to make herself into the matriarch of the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black, and her grim determination to provide the reigning heirs to the family name had known no bounds despite the dramatic age difference between her and Orion.  Orion was by no means weak or easy manipulated, and he was raised to command the family, but no one stood at chance when Walburga Black nee Black had made up her mind.

            For that matter, the wife chosen for him was a woman who was not contradicted easily.  She raised his daughters in the same vein and selected their husbands with the kind of precise care that would ensure their status would equal that of Walburga and exceed her own oft-lamented position, though never questioned as she was but the first daughter and third child of the secondary Rosier line.

            So much was understood in Alphard’s life.  He never questioned it.  That was why it shocked the ever-living hell out of him when his favorite daughter questioned everything.

            Andromeda was the love of his life.  From the moment that she was placed in his arms, he had known that this daughter would be his.  The first, Bellatrix, had been taken under his wife’s wing and Alphard knew that he would never have the chance to raise the first daughter of his family, the one inevitably destined for the greatest share of legacy and succession.  As a second son, Alphard knew that he would be the one to take the second daughter under his wing.  Even Druella would permit it.

            Andromeda was his.  While Bellatrix endured a terrible tuition under his wife and Narcissa fell into the middle of their dogfight and probably ended up little more than spoiled from their bribes in fighting over her, Andromeda blossomed under his exclusive wing.  She grew up smiling, responsible, clever, outspoken and almost shockingly kind.  She floated about the Family Reunions, fully confident without her older sister’s need to dominate them.  She was charming and winning.

            Andromeda was also trouble, especially when Walburga’s oldest boy seemed to realize abruptly that he could cause trouble at these functions.  She laughed and encouraged him, even feeding him secrets that would aid his mischief.  Alphard would never forget the conversation he overheard them having in an otherwise abandoned corridor during the July Gathering of 1970.

            “Of course it was brilliant, Sirius,” Andromeda said, “I’m just saying that you need to think…properly.  You don’t put frogspawn in Aunt Charis’s tea, you put rosemary.  She’s allergic and won’t admit it.  However, my mother, the hostess, is aware and Aunt Charis knows it.  Watching her punish her cousin for what she sees as an attempt to poison her but will not admit was done with rosemary, to which she will not admit an allergy.  Hours of subtle entertainment watching the feud escalate and untraceable to you because pinning down a culprit would require both women to admit what they pretend doesn’t exist.”

            “I see,” Sirius said with a truly wicked grin.  “You’re an evil genius, Andy, aren’t you?”

            “I just appreciate the subtle distinction in mischief that is difference between enjoying a bottle of merlot by the fire all night versus chugging a car bomb,” she replied with a warm, mischievous smile.

            “What exactly is in a car bomb?”

            “When you don’t have to ask, and only then, will I consider giving you one,” Andromeda told him with a laugh.

            Alphard was not entirely sure how to respond to his favorite daughter’s conversation with one of his favorite nephews.  It was reassuring that, however very different she was than most of her family, she knew them and felt a part of them absolutely.  She knew the family inside out, and she knew how to survive and thrive within it.

            It was actually something of a relief.

            And watching Charis turn on Druella was first rate entertainment.  Both women were masters of the kind of jibes only the truly aristocratic could wield properly.

            “Quite a tip you gave young Sirius there,” he told her when the party was over and he was certain that they were alone in her room.

            “You don’t disapprove, do you, Dad?” Andromeda asked, looking up hopefully at his face, afraid of his reprimand.

            Alphard had smiled at her then.  “We’re in this together, Andromeda.  By all means, terrorize your aunts to your hearts content, but never under any circumstances give that boy alcohol.”  She had giggled, and their bond had grown.

            Raising Andromeda was the first responsibility that belonged solely to him, that was placed in his control and power.  She was also the first person on whom the younger son of the non-primary line of the Black Family attempted to assert his will.

            It started when she came home from her last year of Hogwarts and, the moment that they were alone, pulled him into her room and seemed to burst with girlish excitement.  “Dad!” she practically squealed in a way that he had never seen her act before.  She had even relaxed her posture and was practically dancing with glee.  “I’ve got to tell you.  Don’t tell Mum, all right, but I met this amazing guy!”

            Alphard Black felt cold.  His favorite daughter did not seem to notice.  “He’s so brilliant, Dad!  The way he talks…I’ve never connected with anyone the way I do with him and it’s just – effortless for him!  He’s going into the Ministry now that we’re out of Hogwarts, and he’s already impressed the hell out of Barty Crouch.  And he talked me into trying a job at the Department of International Magical Relations – just think!  All these years dealing with the Family has been preparing me perfectly to work in liaisons to foreign countries – I have a shot an internship with the representatives to the International Confederation of Wizards!  And he’s coached me through it every step of the way, and he’s so funny!  He’s the most genuinely good man that I’ve ever met, and, more importantly, Dad, he makes me a better person.  He’s just –“

            “I hope,” her father cut off her rant, “that you have not taken such a leave of your senses as to fall in love with this boy.”

            “Dad,” Andromeda gasped in surprise.  “Daddy, what do you-“

            “You know that you are not available, Andromeda,” Alphard told her firmly.  “Tell me the name of this young man so I may have the proper discussion with his parents.”

            “Dad, you can’t be serious about that Dolohov match,” Andromeda said, sounding as if she fully believed this truth.  “I mean, please!  I know Mum says but _you -_ ”

            “His name, Andromeda,” Alphard told her without wavering.

            “Ted Tonks.”  The moment that she said the name, Andromeda changed.  She sounded neither giddy nor uncertain now.  She immediately regained her perfect posture and even thrust herself slightly forward in the dignified pride her family had perfected over centuries but rarely used to defend Mudbloods.  Her eyes held a strength that he had never seen there before, that he had thought had not been passed into her genetic make-up.

            Alphard Black drew back his hand and, for the first time in her life, slapped Andromeda soundly across the face.

            She turned back, touching her face with the back of her hand and gaping in horror at him.  Though she did not say it, Alphard could hear her cry out for the father she knew, the daddy he had been to her and not his other children.  “You will never see this boy again, and you will not be taking a job at the Ministry.  It will certainly not be in an underling position under a Mudblood British representative.”

            It was the first time that Alphard had wielded his authority and asserted his will as a male of the Black Family.  It did not succeed.

            Two weeks of screaming fights that shook the house and three duels between Andromeda and Bellatrix that nearly destroyed it later, Druella practically blasted a hole in the wall expelling Andromeda’s personal belongings out of the front door and into the square.  Andromeda’s words upon the threshold rang through the house for days, “Be ashamed of me if you like, but I will not be a mindless trophy wife like the lot of you.  _That_ would be a disgrace to my _potential_.”  She left the house with dignity, waving her wand to effortlessly assemble her belongings into the Hogwarts trunk they had thought she unpacked for the last time, and Disapparated with a plop that Alphard did not know punctured his very soul for many months.

            Not until a week later, when Alphard stumbled into the room that held the Family Tree Tapestry and saw that Walburga had blasted his favorite daughter off of it, did he realize that he would never see his daughter again, never think with pride that he had raised a daughter who would glide among the Family effortlessly and charmingly with quiet loyalty but no conformity.

            It was then that he realized, looking at where his secondary branch connected with the direct line, that he had been protected by being the second son not designed to wield the power of the Black Family’s collective will.  With that authority came the responsibility for what came of his decisions.  What the power over Andromeda’s upbringing he became solely responsible for her behavior – and for losing her.

            This along with the fury at her defiance – and far more, at her desertion – kept him from protesting on her behalf when his wife and Walburga ensured that her final prediction would not come true.  No one in the wizarding world would employ Andromeda Tonks, as she became only a year after leaving her home.  They married on the anniversary of the day that her mother had expelled her from her lifelong home.  It was a large, public and even extravagant ceremony to which half of the wizarding world, including every single member of the Noble and Most Ancient House of Black, was invited.  Alphard knew that they would not attend, and, by extension, he would not attend.

            But he could do no work, could not muster words to speak to anyone, on the day that he stayed at home while his favorite daughter married a man that he had never met, a man that she had chosen over him.  He knew that, whatever happened between them, she had been hoping that he would come.  She had reached out her hand to have them both.  She must have known that her mother would never accept him, but she had asked him to look at Ted Tonks before condemning him.  

            Alphard knew this from the weekly letters that she sent to his office.  At first he had not opened them.  Then, one day, he had snapped and read every single word in one very long night.  From then on, whenever he would receive them he would lovingly save them and pour over the words of his favorite daughter, the love of his life, his darling Andromeda.  She was never surprised or discouraged that he did not respond, though he could imagine that her husband could not understand her grim resolution to continue to write to him.

            Those letters were how he learned that, confined to the household chores she had mocked her sisters for being content with, she had perfected them to an art form.  She opened a small business in her neighborhood selling her enhanced cleaning tools and self-help books on everything from cooking to cleaning to keeping a garden.  She published under a different name and, quietly, started the small business Mrs. Shower’s All-Purpose Mess Remover.  Ted’s sole salary at the Ministry did not allow her to expand it, and without being able to afford more stringent protections against the War on Voldemort, Alphard Black considered reaching out an unrequested hand to help his favorite daughter survive and prosper.  Especially when, only a year and a half after their marriage, his daughter wrote to him that her first daughter had been born.

            Of course, he knew that he could not do it.  Not while he was alive.  Especially when he learned that he was expected to die very soon, he considered leaving Andromeda her proper share in his will.  He knew that Druella and Orion would have it voided immediately.

            Then, when his nephew Sirius, Andromeda’s playful protégé, ran away from Orion and Walburga, Alphard seized his chance.  He confirmed quietly with every magical law authority not connected with his family.  Only in the direct line could a will be cancelled by even a wife with such bargaining power as Druella, and almost nothing could prevent the inheritance to the direct male heir of the Black Family.  Orion and Walburga could not stop him giving money to Sirius the way that Druella could stop him from giving Andromeda her inheritance.

            That only left spending the rest of his life pretending to hate his favorite daughter, the one to whose marriage had become reconciled long ago.  It was that she abandoned him to the rest of the Blacks that he could not forgive.  He wanted to visit her home, meet her daughter, shake her husband’s hand as he should have done all those years ago.  He knew that he could not.  He was a man of the Black Family.  He was a second son of an ancient line whose responsibility was to toe the line of Orion’s making.

            That was all that Alphard had without Andromeda.  Without defining himself as Andromeda’s father.

            As she learned that he was dying, Andromeda sent ever more desperate entreaties for news, for life, for some sign that her father still loved her.  She wrote, in one of the last letters that he received, that while she felt bereft even of those she hated like Bellatrix and her mother, she had only even tried to stay for him.  The loss of her father had left her incomplete, her life cracked.  She wanted him to reach out his hand to her before he died.

            He could not.  He knew that he could not.

            However, when the Will of Alphard Black was read, the humiliated attorney was forced to deliver a large envelope to the disinherited and disgraced Sirius Black at the home of the Potters where he had come to visit for the Christmas Holidays.  Inside were two keys to vaults in Gringotts, every well-worn letter from Andromeda that Alphard had ever received, and a short note to his nephew.

 

_Vault 713 belongs to you.  I request that you pass along the key to Vault 118 to your cousin Andromeda along with the letters enclosed here.  Please tell her that I am more sorry than she could ever know that I did not have the courage to do in life what I should have done for her all along._

            Alphard Black would have been vastly amused to learn that he was, posthumously, scorched off the tapestry like his favorite daughter.  He and Andromeda were in it together again at last.  Once his life was over, his debt to his family was paid, and he was free to be Andromeda’s father again.


	3. Drabble 1: Lily condemns Remus

It wasn’t fair, but they did it anyway.  The Marauders made Lily be the one to say it, because she knew how it felt to lose a friend who had made you who you were.  She had walked the treacherous ground of admitting that a friend who meant everything to you had walked down a path you couldn’t follow.  So the Marauders made Lily Evans be the one to say what they all feared so deep in their bones they couldn’t take a single step without feeling it.

And they knew, just as deep down, that they would never forgive her for saying it and she would never forgive them for making her.


End file.
